Ahern's Guide to Things You Shouldn't be Fighting
by LogicalPremise
Summary: A requested guide to some of the more esoteric (and nasty) elements of the Premiseverse, from the viewpoint of the ever calm and polite Admiral Ahern. Set just prior to Ahern taking over 5th Fleet. Will be expanded based on feedback.
1. Asari, Turians, Salarians

**_A/N:_** _So this is a sort of silly little thing I came up with since I'm still slowly working on the next chapter of TWCD.  
_

 _Entries will be mostly done by whatever people review/message/PM/email to include, with the condition it would have to be someone Ahern has actually met or heard about._

 _Dragunov will also weigh in. :)_

* * *

 ** _FROM : FIFTH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN_**

 ** _TO: FLEET MASTER, SOL, FIRST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV_**

 ** _ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED_**

 ** _ROUTING: CITFLTCOM → ARCRELCOM → SOLMAINCOMMS_**

 ** _CHECKSUM VERIFIED. KEY VERIFIED. DECRYPTING  
_**

 ** _SUBJECT: RE : COMMS REQUEST AND ORDER TASKING, AHERN, TRADIUS : GO FUCK YOURSELF_**

* * *

I guess you think this is _funny_ , huh?

So, as you no doubt know, some stupid bastard in the Office of Military Recon got on the horn with me, as I was packing up my shit to leave Pinnacle. Said they wanted some kind of documentation, my opinion on 'potential hostile actors of note.'

For a minute I though the stupid bastard was asking me how many people Aish Ashland could kill with her fucked up singing, but they clarified it as they wanted a rundown on alien military forces. I wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but then they said you ordered it. Come to find out you're in a bit of hot water with the Ministry of Defense after that pack of N's got ass-raped by the Imperial Guard...

Well. I don't like doing it, but I will. Lord knows that the stupid Defense clowns probably won't read it the right way, but hopefully the AIS can do something with it. Just remember this, Ivan, the next time you give me shit about me cock-blocking you with Adkin's daughter. You owe me one now.

Trust me, you wouldn't have wanted to marry Sheila anyway. I'm goddamned thankful I didn't.

Since I only have a few days until I hit the Citadel, this report is going to be brief. You and I know most of this shit, but the point the staffing spook made was true – a lot of people don't really get it. They don't know how to deal with a charging Warlord, or what a goddamned Nightwind even is, or why a goddamned Razorsinger is only a threat if you're stupid enough to fight one underwater.

I'm going to do this as quick as I can. First I'll cover the alien military special forces. Then I'll go over the creeps and weirdos that don't quite fit that category. Finally, I'll cover some real killers.

As I am the most goddamned lethal thing in space after diving head first into a black hole or eating the pork at K-Changs in San Angeles, I've come up with a unit of measure for just how dangerous a potential enemy is. We'll call a single unit of deadliness an _**Ahern**_. One Ahern means, basically, a single member of the unit is worth one of me. Sometimes, I'll say a whole unit is worth one of me if you're not going to run into singletons.

I hear you laughing, but you come up with a better baseline on your own. This isn't an official report, jackass, just some notes. You can have your goddamned choir boys in the AIS _clean_ it up, they'll probably get a kick out of turning normal English into spook-speak.

I'll start with the Big Three, then move on to cover volus, batarian and krogans, and finish up with the quarians and drell, what little I know about hanar, and then the superfreaks like P. Won't take very long, and if you need follow up you can find me on the Citadel.

* * *

 **ASARI**

* * *

Overall, the asari are the scariest military to deal with, because they have flexibility. They have more training, plasma weapons, they are all fucking biotic, get stronger as they get older, and don't squabble much among each other. They don't have pissing contests over who is in charge the way we do. Their tactics tend to cut your command chains into bits, and you can't return the favor because the matriarchs are seeded through the entire unit and prevent morale from collapsing.

Their stock military girls aren't worth worrying about, since they almost never actually get deployed. No, the main things you have to watch are the commandos, the war priestesses, and the goddamned Nightwind.

* * *

 _ASARI COMMANDO_

The commando is a middling biotic but has very good skills at tracking, sniping and suppression. They fight either from long range and stealth, or up close with speed.. A single commando isn't that much better than a human soldier in terms of durability without biotics, but in a group they're deadly. They train for decades in combined tactics, they know each others' moves inside out, and they don't get demoralized or angry-stupid. Best way to shut them down is when they're trying to close in, with explosives and anti-biotic grenades.

Most commandos work in teams, and some of these teams have been together for decades...or even centuries. Don't expect an easy fight, and do expect them to surprise you at least once. They sometimes contract out mercs as backup and support forces, so do your homework unless you like being flanked by a pack of Blue Suns heavies.

Best tactics I recommend are to break them up and don't let them use their teamwork. If that means smokescreens, explosives, or goddamned tapioca pudding, use it. A single commando will go down to enough firepower in short order.

Threat: _about .2 Aherns._ I had to fight some of the bitches in the mess with Vasir back in the day and dropped five of them by myself. They don't like flamethrowers very much.

* * *

 _WAR PRIESTESS_

The war priestess is on top of the fucking food chain. NOTHING else in this goddamned fucked ass galaxy is anywhere as lethal, crazy, or sexy.

The younger ones are fanatics, and the older ones can bounce tank rounds and knock frigates out of the sky. The WP relies entirely on biotics and a warp sword – the sword makes armor a waste of fucking time, and kinetic barriers won't stop it either. That means if you let them get close you WILL die. At range you're also fucking dead, because they can hit with flares that do more damage than artillery shells and every kind of biotic bullshit you can imagine.

Very few war priestess have ever lost a fight, and that's usually after they're half dead and exhausted. None of the ones who've been defeated in the past couple of centuries were done in one on one fights – usually you need at least three or four real hard fuckers to take one down.

The only people I know of who can drop one reliably – as in almost every time – are Dancers striking from stealth, and some crazy fuckers like Tazzik or Tetrimus. Anyone else who fights one-on-one is dead. I wouldn't advise it.

The best choices you have are (and I'm not shitting you here) air-fuel explosives and/or low-yield tac nukes. I've seen these bitches BOUNCE – as in completely fucking stop – mass accelerator rounds from a turian tank. And if they drop an anchor on a ship it's going to tear the mass core right off it's mounting, and then the ship will go boom.

Threat: Shit. _Easily ten Aherns._ Benezia took on six Spectres, a dozen Broker agents, god knows how many C-SEC fuckers, an asari blade-mistress, plus Shepard and her team, and the only reason she lost is she basically gave the fuck up and killed HERSELF. And the High Solarch fucked up a SPACESHIP on foot.

Let's not piss one off.

* * *

 _ASARI NIGHTWIND_

I've only heard bits and pieces about these asari, some kind of outcasts who can kill you with their mind – through melding, I think. What firm facts I know about them is that they're stronger biotically than most asari, kitted out with a ton of biotic blueware cybernetics, and used mostly in espionage and seduction roles by the asari. There's a couple of types, the Nightwind is used more for killing, and the Daywind is more for infiltration.

I don't know if the Nightwind and Daywind are the same thing or different. Asari... really, really do not like talking about them.

I asked my old buddy Tela about them and she told me a few things – reluctantly. (Protip: getting an asari drunk is bad, but it's worse when you have a sneaking suspicion she wants to bang you. My wife would have killed me if I let that happen.) What she told me – and I can't confirm any of this shit – is that the Nightwind were not really 'killers' so much as 'assassins when you didn't expect them'. If they sleep with someone, that fucker is dead or mind-fried, or at the very least incapacitated. The Nightwind have some kind of weird ability to mess with people's thoughts and make them go along with whatever they say, which sounds far-fetched but explains why the Asari has a hard-on for these ardat-yakshi things.

Tactics to take them out are simple: lots of anti-biotic grenades, lots of suppressive fire mixed with snipers, and once they close in, explosives. Don't ever get into a biotic fight with them, their biotics are too strong and they'll fucking massacre your adepts.

Threat: hard to say. If they fight like commandos but have stronger biotics, lets say it's .5 Aherns. If what Tela said about their ability to fuck with your mind is true.. ugh. _At least two Aherns._

God, it would fucking glorious if there were **actually** two of me.

* * *

 _ASARI BLADEMISTRESS_

These are rare. These are deadly. These are not the bitches with which to fuck, and while I don't fear anything in this galaxy this is probably as close as it gets.

They're mostly matrons or matriarchs who have spent most of their lives practicing with and fighting with a warp sword, in a non-religious manner. To me, they sound like fucking Jedi, but their reputation in asari society is a mix of respect and dislike.

Asari aren't usually warlike, but blademistresses ARE. Very, very, very warlike. Most of them are blunt, rude, and direct. Most of their biotics is designed to work with their sword-fighting and bringing themselves in close to an enemy. And unlike the rest of the blues, blademistresses usually wear good armor and will happily use other weapons, explosives, poisons, and God only knows what else.

Stupid idiots ask why asari use warp swords. Again. The asari have a barrier, and most of these biotic barriers are strong enough to let them laugh off small arms for the few seconds it takes them to biotic charge your position. Then you have someone with a sword that ignores your own kinetic shields, slices through armor as if it ain't there, and will cut your fucking head off with a single slice. THAT is why they keep using them. You let one get in close, you're fucked.

On the other hand, at range, they vary. As I said, some use other weapons – some of them are nasty snipers, and if you run into one like that you're pretty much fucked. Others focus more on work with the biotic charge and shotguns to close in, and at range are pretty weak.

They have good barriers, tend towards heavier armor, and are tricky with a flash-step, but a sniper can stop one pretty easy. Or mines. I wouldn't rely on anti-biotic grenades or anything like that, though – like I said, they use other weapons a lot, and even if they didn't the eezo in their warp sword is too powerful to be disrupted.

Since they can literally run their biotic power through their sword, it allows them (at close range) to shake off any suppression.

Finally, be aware – in the sword there's about three pounds of eezo, highly charged. They can set that thing off by breaking it, and the resulting warp blast is extremely lethal to anything in close proximity.

Threat: _at least 6 Aherns._ Tela isn't half-assed trained in this kind of fighting yet, and I'd rather cut off my own dick than get in a close-range fight with her. Less fucking painful. I met her aunt once (aftermath of the attempt on the Queen Matriarch) and Jesus fucking Christ that old girl was scary with a sword.

* * *

 _CREEPS AND WEIRDOS : GODTALKERS and MIDNIGHT KISS_

Ugh. One thing I've learned the hard way is every species has fucking _freaks_. These are the ones you want to write up as 'do not engage' without a qualifier.

There's never a reason to fight these people and you won't fucking win.

First , Godtalkers. There's a type of war priestess that is even crazier than the normal ones. They blind themselves ritually and somehow use biotics or something to 'see'. They're called Godtalkers.

From a strictly military standpoint, they're not as bad as a war priestess. They can't fucking see, and while they can sense things within a few dozen feet that won't help them against a sniper.

There's two problems. The first is Godtalkers are the so called Chosen of Athame. They wander space (mostly asari space, but who can tell) looking for things that 'the Goddess finds of interest' and then they get involved. Bottom line? Godtalkers are usually found where there's a large accumulation of biotic power without any kind of strong leadership. A Godtalker in Alliance space almost certainly means a big batch of biotic terrorists.

That doesn't mean they're hostile – twice they've managed to talk a situation down – but you can't be sure, because twice they've also made a situation go hot and end up with a lot of dead people. Did I mention only very senior priestesses end up as Godtalkers?

You probably want a slug of whiskey for this other thing.

The second part – and this is according to several people I trust – is that Godtalkers, while not technically part of the Church of Athame anymore, are seen as a direct conduit to the goddess.

Let me break this down to you real simply : A Godtalker can tell an entire pack of war priestess, an asari telsharess in charge of a whole fleet, or an entire chapter of Justicars to go do something and they will – _no questions asked._

Killing one – assuming you actually could – would probably make the asari declare war on us.

So you get an idea here, when Kyle went crazy and died, there was a Godtalker at the base – she left with Shepard and went about her merry business. But just the fact that the Alliance assaulted a world she had been on infuriated the Asari Republic so badly they warned us if it happened again they would restructure trade and technology agreements.

Threat: _Call it 3 Aherns,_ they're still war priestess. Danger? They can command almost anything. Leave it alone.

The other freak is the Midnight's Kiss. This is some kind of super-special ardat-yakshi killer. We don't know who's in charge of them, but there's more than one, and based on the way Tela talked about it, I don't think they answer to the Council of Matriarchs.

Not much that I know about them except they have all the danger of a top-end commando rolled together with the fun of a brain-eating serial killer. Again, there's no goddamned reason any Alliance force should be fucking with these people, and if some poor bastard finds himself up against one then I recommend he eats a bullet before she gets her claws into him.

No clear way to rate their threat, so call it the same as the Nightwind, _2 Aherns._

* * *

 **SALARIAN**

* * *

Grays are a bit more straightforward than asari – some of the asari are on our side, some are on their own side. The salarians are out to fuck everybody, though. It's nice not having to deal with ambiguity at times.

Salarians see warfare as a waste of time for the most part. Their professional soldiers are the Shieldbreakers, poor bastards with all their limbs cut off and shoved into a battlesuit. The rest of their military forces, frankly, suck ass – aside from the Shield Dragoons, they fight very poorly on defense. Even vorcha can hold a line better than standard salarian troops.

For infiltration, bombings, mayhem, assassination and dirty tricks, though, no one beats them. Salarians are (like me) very fond of grenades and know how to use them properly – a few adepts to use biotic throws and fling them back in their faces would be a good idea. Salarians are fast, accurate and smart, but can't absorb shock or damage and will rout quickly if broken.

Salarians are _more_ flexible tactically in some ways than asari, but they have pre-set stances and responses to most attacks. If you can feint-out the salarian commander you can get him to do some pretty stupid shit before he wises up.

* * *

 _SALARIAN SHIELD DRAGOON_

The more senior, older soldiers in heavier armor, the shield dragoon rates a mention because he is a very tough bastard to kill. Kitted in multilayer Silaris body armor and overlapping kinetic barriers behind a deployable kinetic shield, he's got onboard medical kits and other tricks to keep him alive.

Now, your stupider morons will think Shield Dragoons aren't a 'real' threat because they don't have a lot of offensive power. Which is FUCKING RETARDED, because while a squad of shield dragoons doesn't hit real hard, if you let them get good and dug in they can – and I do not exaggerate – survive heavy orbital bombardment. They will fuck your day up and taunt you about it, and getting past them is the worst pain in the ass I've ever seen. They are **very** heavy on field engineering and infowar, drone uses and deployable defenses, quick-set omni-flash barricades and especially mines.

The best tactics are feints and the use of area-denial techniques to flush them from cover, although that's going to be tough to do. Biotics would work wonders here, they don't have any particular defenses against that. If they're dug in heavily your best shot at pulling them out is sadly going to be attritional assault – use mechs if you can, because it's going to take a long time to wear them down.

On the direct attack they aren't much. If they are defending, I'd say they're _a solid 1 Ahern._ I've gone up against a squad once – damn near killed me with monomolecular wire, motion sensing plasma flare mines and sniping. I flushed them out by blowing a dam and flooding the area, then picking them off as they broke their defensive setup so they didn't drown.

* * *

 _STG WAR SPECIALIST_

The STG is mostly spooks like the AIS. Now, the AIS guys aren't wimps, I'll give them that, but they aren't trained soldiers either, and neither is most of the STG. Nine times out of ten an STG team will panic if they come under heavy fire - I don't blame them, they're not trained for that. Bottom line is that intelligence agents and specialists may be nasty assassins and good at taking out lone targets, they rarely if ever are equipped - or mentally ready - to endure the rigors of true battlefield conditions.

The War Specs are the exception. I don't know details, but most of them are Solus clan, hard and twitchy bastards with a fixation on guns and speed. War Specs will focus on one field (tech, medicine, explosives, hacking, whatever) and then pick two more and a weapons style to master. The STG mixes these teams up freely, so you have no fucking clue what's coming down the pike.

In a straight fight they're not that dangerous – but you'll never, ever see a straight fight out of these fuckers. A cell is made of six to eight of them, and each one is going to be running their own schemes. Some of them have subgroups, mercenary companies, hired krogan or even Remembrance Dancers on call. Others have access to batttle-suits. Or chemical laser satellites. Probes that spit out clouds of nano-grenades. Fucking mech computing clouds equipped with tanglewire. A goddamned ghost-hacked krogan warlord with remote piloting overrides.

Or Jesus fuck knows what else. Most of them are, if you didn't already figure this out, completely motherfucking crazy.

As each cell is different, it's kinda hard to tell you what the best tactics are at taking them out. But a few points come to mind: liberal use of snipers, explosives, and poison gas will usually do the trick against almost anything. As most of these teams don't have biotics, the use of vanguard charges to get inside their battle range and crush them in CQB should also work. Above all else, don't let them have the initiative - force them to react, not set you up.

Threat : A full cell of these spooks is definitely enough to kill me, or you, so let's call it _two Aherns for a cell._

* * *

 _SALARIAN TRANSCENDENTAL_

Oh, god.

Just... have your people write up 'Do not engage. Ever. Period.'

Salarian Transcendentals are their **elite** biotics. They move fast – _very_ fast, much faster than most salarians, who already move like GASCAR on crack – and their biotics are extremely precise and deadly. You're not going to get a chance to take them out – most times when these guys go full out, the target is dead the minute they get on the field.

Eni Gasha? The guy who took down Tyriun No Kage? That was a Transcendental. Shift? The cybered up fucker who killed an entire company of Corsairs operating in Aria's space? That was one. You get the idea. They're nasty, fast, full of all the usual dirty STG tricks on top of magical blue bullshit, and worst of all, they look just like a normal salarian. Fuckers can pop out of nowhere and mow down a goddamned battalion before you even have time to scream.

I'm a bit vague on details (because I'm not nearly stupid enough to fight one), but they operate on their own, with only minimal oversight from the STG usually. A few (like Shift) have gone... independent. But the Salarian Union doesn't seem alarmed... which, given how sneaky the grays are, should just worry you more.

(As an aside, Yonis really, really hates these guys.)

It's hard to describe how fast these bastards are, or how quick they can pull of their biotic attacks. They don't have stamina – if the target survives and can hit back, they don't have good armor and they are shit in melee or most gunfights. Unlike Remembrance Dancers, they can't close in and finish you. They don't have the sheer endurance of a Warpriestess or Warlord, or the sheer power of a Glorious.

Tactics? Ha. Like I said, do not engage. If you have to, you can try area-effect anti-biotic weapons, but I doubt you'd get them off in time. Probably the best bet is flood them with mechs and then have a sniper team engage from multiple directions.

That doesn't mean they're not deadly. I've never faced one myself but Anderson did. Based on how he came out (hospitalized) and how the salarian came out (laughing his ass off) I'd call it _a solid two, possibly three Aherns._

* * *

 _CREEPS AND WEIRDOS : SHIELDBREAKERS_

Salarian Shieldbreakers are super-heavy mechanized infantry in space-capable heavy battle-suits equipped with self-healing armor, strong barriers, and an explosive railgun. The gun (BRKR cannon) is going to go right through the armor of any Alliance unit up to … well, light cruiser. Their battle-suits are far more advanced than anything the Alliance has, and the pilots are genetically modified to be a master of the suit.

They're also sealed into it. They practice all the time, and they're very good at fighting. Shieldbreakers are aggressive units designed to break enemy lines while protecting other salarians. Mini-missiles, plasma flamers, scatter-shot micromines, drones, you name it. The suit itself has cutting blades to use against infantry and a very powerful jump pack.

Tactically, taking these guys out is a pain. High-explosives will do the trick. Anti-tank guns will too. Nothing much else (EMP, mines, rockets, sniper rifles) even penetrates their shield. The problem is surviving the kind of firepower they're putting out to engage in the first place – the BRKR has a range that equals most Alliance tanks, and the suits have mini-GARDIAN systems to take out most light aircraft and gunships.

Threat? A single Shieldbreaker is definitely worth a _good five Aherns._ I've never directly engaged them myself, but I've run simulations here on Pinnacle. Even when I had time to setup, the results weren't pretty. Our own battle-suits will not – I repeat, **not** – be able to take one out even with a three-to-one advantage. Keep that in mind.

* * *

 **TURIAN**

* * *

Overall, I probably have the most experience in fighting the goddamned spikes than anyone else in the Alliance. Turians are very straightforward, they fight to pin you in place then rape you with heavy weapons and drop infantry. Not a lot of tactical variations, but then again, the ones they have were perfected over literally thousands of years, and they work very fucking well.

Turian units have distributed command authority, never break, and only retreat in good order and to prepare for a counter-attack. Their soldiers are stronger and faster than humans, can take a lot more punishment, and their armor and weapons are a good bit better than ours.

Turians practice the Four Movements for their strategic sets - you can look it up online, I'm not the goddamned Common Knowledge Framework. The only thing that I take away from it is that it makes them vulnerable to high-tempo guerilla tactics combined with scorched earth denial tactics, but that isn't always possible to pull off.

Turian commanders aren't known for their creativity, and if you can get them into unconventional situations they're likely to default back to a defensive posture.

* * *

 _PRAETORIANS AND PRAETORS_

* * *

If you weren't aware, the rank of Praetor is reserved for the most powerful, dangerous and crazy of turians. Praetors are supremely powerful combatants who've trained their whole lives on how to be a badass. They're guarded by a group of senior heavy infantry called Praetorians who emulate the spikey they're guarding.

This is another one for the 'Do Not Engage, Fucking Ever' book. The conventional wisdom is that it's almost impossible to take a Praetor down in single combat, and not much easier even in a full battle. Unlike most spikes, Praetors are likely to be more mentally flexible and willing to take chances and risks other turians wouldn't out of fear of failure. To be one you have to chase down and kill some kind of crazy biotic animal on Palaven, and all other sorts of ridiculous chest-beating testosterone poisoning.

Their fanboys are also seriously bad news, given that they're equipped with top of the line equipment and are training hard to be as powerful as their boss is.

I don't really have a good idea on how to counter them, as no human forces have engaged in combat with them. I did spar with one, the Primarch, once – stupid HANDSHAKE crap dreamed up by the team in charge of OPW. Fedorian was stronger, faster, and way tougher than I was, and while I did manage to last fifteen minutes in hand to hand, it wasn't pretty. I spent two weeks in the hospital after that fight, and needed two ribs and my shinbone replaced since they'd been pulverized. I think he was up and walking around the day after the fight.

Call the Praetor themselves _six Aherns,_ and each of the Praetorians as _.5 Aherns._

* * *

 _RAPTOR GUARD_

I hate these assholes. Turian hotshot snipers in SKYTALON battle armor, these fuckers are the turian equivalent of the DACT. Except their suits can fly, not just jump, and they carry a SPEAR minigun that will wreck an MAKO or HAMRHEAD in a few good shots.

The SKYTALON suit is a nasty piece of engineering. Stout enough to bounce almost all small arms fire, the only weapons we use that can take it down are missiles, heavy grenades (probably more than three), and anti-material rifles. Given that they hop around like a grasshopper on crack and usually lay down barrages of minigun fire, getting shots off with the rifles is tricky.

The best tactics I've seen are engaging them with biotics, flak, or determining where they are likely to drop in at and seeding the area with mines. In close a SKYTALON is no joke, they use an omni-axe that will cut a suit of Devastator armor in half, as well as anti-personnel mini-missiles and nano-wire tanglefields.

Threat? _A solid 1 Ahern_. I've killed six of these things over the years, and every one was a fight I barely survived.

* * *

 _FINAL LINE SOLDIER_

The turians have this thing about retreating – they hate it. They hate the idea anything is stronger than them, and they hate running away from a fight. Now a normal species might work on defenses, or tactics to disengage while keeping into the fight. But not the turians.

Instead, they make a special group of soldiers who can't retreat and who will always die to hold the line. The Final Line, as they call it, hence the fucking name.

A Final Line soldier is a full-conversion cyborg that interfaces with a specially designed battle-suit. Most of the time the soldier in question is older, was dying or crippled, and has no living family left. Final Line soldiers never fall back even a single step.

The suits are extremely heavily armored, lots of evil backups and tricks built into each one, and armed with what the AIS weenies tell me is a fucking small-scale mass relay. It projects a beam of accelerated matter to way past lightspeed, coming out as a giant fuck-all cone of explosions, radiation and pain.

Nothing in the Alliance arsenal can take a hit from this weapon – it will go through battlecruiser armor.

Thing is, the turians only deploy these soldiers when they're getting their asses beaten, so while dealing with them is a pain, it does mean the turians are losing badly. The Final Line will hold position as long as possible so the turians can regroup and dig in, and their whole goal is to do as much damage as possible to the enemy before going down.

Tactics? The best tactic is to not play their silly fucking game and bring them down with artillery and biotics. If you can punch through or bypass them, the turians on the other side will not be ready to repel an attacks.

Fighting these things one on one isn't even suicide. I'd easily _give it ten Aherns,_ as I saw one in action during the FCW. Back then, they didn't have their mass relay gun, but they had SPEAR miniguns, which are just as bad, and I saw them shatter an armored column trying to flank them.

* * *

 _CREEPS AND WEIRDOS : MASTER CABALISTS_

Turians are strange fuckers. One of my old buddies, guy named Pellham, was actually shacked up with a turian chick before died, and a lot of what I know that I didn't learn from fighting the spikes comes from him. One thing he told me I always found very true was the turians are in love with melodrama.

Their biotics take this to whole new levels, wearing spooky black robes, red face paint, and acting like a pack of magicians. But turian biotics are no joke. Unlike ours, they train heavily in conventional military tactics and are more than capable in a regular fight.

A biotic turian is called a cabalist, and is part of a cabal – twenty four turians, twelve male and twelve female, bonded together in pairs. Out of these twenty four, almost all of them will be dead in twenty or thirty years.

The few who survive are put into more senior groups, and the ones who actually survive a second tour of duty are called Master Cabalists.

These are very bad people to deal with. Tetrimus was a Master Cabalist, and probably the most badass of them, but even the weakest of them would smear an entire coven of Adepts and could probably give a War Priestess the fight of her entire life.

Master Cabalists don't bother with regular armor. Their robes are sewn with packets of eezo to strengthen their barriers, and they use a knock-off version of the asari martial art susano to create kinetic 'plates' of hard barriers to block most weapons. They're well trained, tough, skilled with biotics at all ranges and a nightmare in CQB because they can cover their claws in warpfire.

Master Cabalists are truly dangerous because of their combined arms skills. They can use sniper rifles and assault rifles just as good as any other soldier, and many of them are snipers themselves. Almost all of them have camo-cloaks and they load themselves down with anti-biotic gear to take out other races biotics. Most of them have heavy blueware as well, meaning not only can the bastard fry you with warp or fling you off a cliff, but in close can kill you with a punch and take a direct hit from a LMG.

It's not worth fighting these bastards, because Master Cabalists are usually in charge of a strike team of lesser biotics, so you're going to be facing a dozen or more biotics and they're very good at teamwork and counterstriking. Tactics against them are pretty limited – they know how to fight without biotics, most of them tend to strike from stealth and flanking positions, and all of them are elites.

In the FCW we didn't fight these freaks until almost the end, and they tore through our ranks. Heavy explosives, mines, poison gas, and jury rigged shrapnel traps can wear them down faster. Artillery took out several once, if you can pin down a position and make sure they don't move.

I've seen footage of a rogue Master Cabalist fighting an asari war priestess, and it looked like some shit from a movie. _Easily a good eight Aherns._


	2. Batarians

**_A/N:_** _I'm sure my_ _Russian is terrible , I apologize in advance._

* * *

 ** _FROM : FLEET MASTER, SOL, FIRST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV_**

 ** _TO: FIFTH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN_**

 ** _ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED_**

 ** _ROUTING: CITFLTCOM → ARCRELCOM → SOLMAINCOMMS_**

 ** _CHECKSUM VERIFIED_**

 ** _SUBJECT:_ идти взрывать себя**

* * *

Ah, Tradius. I had forgotten how wonderfully crude and _nekulturny_ you could behave. I often have little wonderings about how your mother must have wanted to wash out your mouth with soap.

Still it is good of you to help. You did not have to do so. I am grateful. I can admit gratefulness. Unlike you.

But I worry.

The current administration is... _tupoy_. Stupid. Short of sight, and worse things. I thought they would have replaced me as Fleet Master. I worry that they have not. I am to shield the fleet from political meddling, but my job has been bypassed in some ways.

I tell you this to warn you things are off on Terra, in Vancouver. This vice president, this Richard Manswell, I do not have good gut feelings about him. You and I have always disagreed, but I am not fool enough to think you are not a patriot. Manswell... is not. He is cold. Like a machine.

My wife says I am a superstitious old peasant but I do not like him at all. When I brought my concerns about the readiness of our forces to engage enemy elites he dismissed my concerns, along with Prince Aloxius. And then, when N-Team 42 was destroyed by those Imperial Guard, I was made to be the one at fault. They are both too quick to dismiss.

Obviously, the fool of a High Admiral is of zero fucking use. How did we allow a clown who is the fake hero of a made up invasion to act as our CO I will never grasp.

I also have worries about the Imperial Guard. We know almost nothing and the AIS is not giving me information. My hands are tied, and all the High Lords care about is cutting expenditures. Given the Reaper threat, that makes very little sense.

I look forward to your next piece. This one was very helpful. Most of my own wartime experiences were space-side, aside from turians. I had forgot about SKYTALONS. I do not thank you for reminding me.

* * *

 _ **FROM : FIFTH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN**_

 _ **TO: FLEET MASTER, SOL, FIRST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV**_

 _ **ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED**_

 _ **ROUTING: CITFLTCOM → ARCRELCOM → SOLMAINCOMMS**_

 _ **CHECKSUM VERIFIED**_

 _ **SUBJECT: I CAN READ CYRILLIC, ASSHOLE**_

* * *

Well I'm fucking delighted to be of assistance. I mean, you are some kind of lord high noble grand holy family Second Rank whateverthefuck, and I'm a baronet.

Idiot.

That being said... I've noted a few things that bother me too, but I've sort of ignored them. I saw some shit at the end of the Benezia mess I didn't like, and a lot more when Shepard died and Anderson went crazy.

I think – no proof – Shepard tumbled to whatever made Kyle commit suicide by Alliance invasion. Whatever it was, it was bad , Ivan. Shepard was a goddamned headcase, even after Liara sort of straightened her out. The last time I talked to the girl she was full of doubt and scared.

I can't even fucking imagine what the fuck would scare a crazy bitch like that aside from krogan/volus porn.

I've been too busy unfucking the goddamned mess Hackett left of Fifth Fleet logistics and arguing with those BuShips animal rapists to pay much attention to the politics. But something doesn't ring right with me.

A lot of the logistical shit for Fifth Fleet shows missing equipment. Not a lot – and God knows Hackett is too busy fucking his cute little secretaries to actually bother hard-checking his manifests – but enough that someone in Supply has to be covering it up.

Did some digging, and there's more of the same in Fourth and Second fleet. Thought about taking this to Dularis – she'd blow a fuse, and Lord General isn't a title they can just tell off. But I don't know where she stands... or if she's involved, too.

For now, I'll agree something is fishy. The way Shepard was found and killed is fishy. The whole fucked up thing about how her body was covered is fishy. The von Graths should be shamed but are drowning in cash all of a sudden.

Anderson being locked up in the loony bin makes zero sense as well.

Fuck it, whatever happens, happens. Just strip this header out before you send it to Yonis' people, I don't want to listen to his fucking whining again.

To be honest, sitting back and reviewing what I know of enemy elites makes me a bit worried. Our own elites are all N's, there's less than a couple of thousand. Most of our N7s would make goddamned ketchup out of half of these clowns I'll be describing, but the other half... ugh.

With the exception of Delacor – who you already know my opinion on – and Valerie Kyle, all of our rel heavy hitters are either over fifty years old or fucking dead. I worry.

Anyway, you didn't ask to hear me ramble, I'm sure. Since you brought up the Imperial Guard, I'll talk about the fucking squints.

* * *

 **BATARIANS**

* * *

Your average batarian is a brutish thug with the sensativity of a plumber and the mercy of a hungry vorcha. Most of 'em lead short, miserable fucking lives on hellhole farm worlds where they slave away for some noble bastard living in an orbital palace.

Batarian State Arms is the worst fucking joke in space, I'd rather take on a thresher maw with my dick than trust my life to those shit weapons and armor. The Alliance seems proud we beat the state armies so easily, but their gear and training are shit, their morale is shit, their officers are shit.

The batarian special forces are not shit.

* * *

 _SPECIAL INTERVENTION UNIT_

The SIU is one of the most cold-blooded, profession, hard-ass and scary groups in the entire galaxy. Unlike most units, the SIU's entire ranks are made up of orphans, raised by the SIU from birth. They are given harsh training that kills a good third of the recruits, bombarded with propoganda, and trained sixteen hours a day for a decade before they hit the field.

Your average SIU team is five agents lead by a Senior. They have very good weapons – usually the Striker Assault Gun. This thing lets off with rapid-fire microgrenades that throw poisonous metal shrapnel around. Backup weapons are super-caliber pistols and fast-firing SMGS with phasic rounds.

Their armor is some kind of nanotube bullshit under synthetic spider-silk done in black. Most of them have a eight to ten second cloak, and all of them have an upgraded omni-tool with subjugation and interrogation tools built on. The armor is actually pretty good at stopping most rifle and pistol rounds, and excellent against blunt impacts or knife attacks.

The SIU breaks up revolts, puts down slave rebellions, and kills foreign intelligence agents inside the Batarian borders. They usually don't operate outside of batarian space, but that can change. Most of their teams are setup with specific functions, but they shuffle them around every few months for cross training.

These are hard professional soldiers, not the clowns you see in the slavers or state ranks. More than a few have defected, despite all the brainwashing and propaganda, because they are professionals. They don't bother with torture, they don't engage in slaving ops, and they actually bother to respect the Citadel laws against war crimes, unlike the Imperial Guard.

Taking them down isn't easy. They're trained as teams but also given survival training and how to fight solo. They're used to explosives and focus heavily on counter charges. They're weak against biotics and oddly enough rarely if ever have anit-biotic gear or snipers, so that may be useful.

Threat: A good SIU cell would make me work for it, . _8 Aherns. Their best might rate a full Ahern._

* * *

 _THE FIST OF KHAR'SHAN_

The Fist was the elite infantry of the old Hegemon class. Since most of the Hegemon caste was killed by the Emperor in the Uprising, the leadership is now entirely Imperial caste younger males, but the rest of the Fist is still high-caste batarians.

These boys are seriously tough to take out. Unlike the low and mid caste trash you see in the State guard, the Fist has its guys all pay to equip and outfit themselves. Since they're all high caste, they can afford the best shit smuggled in from Aria or wherever. Expect top of the line armor, all kinds of heavy weapons, class II or even class III kinetic barriers, and the like.

The Fist's battle tactics are not that different from our own, except the batarian tendency to use terror tactics to put themselves in a better position. About a fourth of the Fist is kitted out as heavy infantry, with LMGs and grenades along with whatever other toys they have. Another fourth is setup as combat engineers, and they're pretty good even without fancy omni-tool toys. The rest of the Fist is split between infiltration teams, artillery and battle-suits.

The Fist's biggest danger is they almost never surrender. Most of them are very well trained – in the few battles they've participated in they made dogmeat out of A-rate marines and some of them were holding their own against N's.

Biggest weakness they have now is the Imperial caste leadership is not very well trained or experienced. That means, for the most part, they only offer broad guidance and depend heavily on junior officers and the NCO corps to hold coherency. Fuck that up, and you might actually break them.

Best countering tactics against small units involve biotics, any kind of vision damaging or obscuring weapons, and scent based weapons – they hate the smell of oregano, for some reason, and ammonia fumes will trigger uncontrolled vomiting. They are very good at taking flanking attempts, but not so hot if you can use area denial techniques.

I've killed off enough of these fuckers to respect their danger. A full squad (fifteen batarians) is worth _at least .5 Aherns._

* * *

_IMPERIAL GUARD_

Freaks.

The Imperial Guard has been weird for years, but has only gotten fucking weirder in the past ten years. On paper, they're the direct military force of the Batarian Emperor. All of the are Imperial caste, and most of them were trained from birth to serve in the Guard.

The Imperial Guard uses weapons, armor and equipment no one else in the Batarian Empire has access to, and they fight very differently than most batarians. Their armor is some kind of bionetic mesh suit, overlaid with plates of what look like black bone or ceramic. Stuff is clearly organic in nature and looks like it was fucking grown rather than manufactured.

Despite that, it can bounce even mid-range sniper rifle fire and makes them very resistant to explosives and shrapnel. The AIS has tried for years to grab a set, but the stuff melts into black goo if taken off the batarian or if he dies, making that difficult.

Weapons and other equipment are also strange as fuck, made out of some kind of black metal with a sheen to it. It's all high grade shit – the shielding units are point of impact barriers, not a general kinetic field. How the suit works with the shield generator is something the AIS and the techheads still haven't figured out.

None of this tech uses any kind of optronics, which makes sense given the blockade. But none of it is ever used outside the Imperial Guard, which is fucking stupid... unless they're getting the tech from someone else and didn't develop it themselves.

The Guard's tactics rely heavily on sniping, overlapping fire lanes, defensive strongpoints, and stealth. They don't fight anything like other batarians, and tend to only do so on the defense. From the way they tore apart the Forty-Second, I'm guessing taking them on in their home turf is stupid.

There's a lot of things we don't know about the Guard. I have no clue why they have their own ships, but again the ships are different from the regular batarian design and construction methods. Never fought them in space, so I can't be of much use there.

Countering tactics...are tricky. Based on how they fight, I'd honestly suggest using vanguards to charge them, backed up with furies to get in behind the initial charge and wreak havoc, before going in with heavy infantry using area denial weapons and flame units. The Guard is heavy on precise movements, defenses, sniping and holding range, so deny them all of that and they should fold up.

Threat: Harder to measure. The only time I fought one of these guys, I got the drop on him and put my omni-blade through his head before he knew I was there. Based on how they fucking raped the Forty-Second N Unit, I'd give a member of the Imperial Guard _.1 Aherns. _

* * *

_FREAKS AND WEIRDOS : EYES OF KHAR'SHAN_

Most people end up thinking the batarian SIU is their intelligence branch. From my understanding, the SIU is more like our Commissars mixed with some aspects of the AIS, but they work mostly on internal issues.

The batarians know most races don't trust them. And they have entire worlds of slave populations. Their approach to intelligence is therefore to be sneaky. They train child slaves from birth to engage in various intelligence ops, brainwashing them and conditioning them to obedience, and then seed them in poorly guarded outskirt worlds to be 'rescued' along with other real slaves.

These guys wander for a few years, picking up all kinds of intelligence, then get 'captured' in another slave raid and debriefed.

Evil sneaky fuckers.

These poor bastards, called the Eyes of Khar'shan, are dangerous for a couple of reasons. The first one is simple: you don't know who they are. It could be a human, or a salarian, or a turian, or a fucking elcor. Until and unless their cover is blown they usually aren't watched, and while many intel agencies know of how the Eyes work, it's impossible to monitor all the slaves you end up freeing for months or years on end.

The more dangerous part is that their conditioning includes combat training, and they often get loaded down with bionetic upgrades and implants. Trust me, the first time a scrawny young woman kicks a Commissar across the room and breaks the necks of a pair of marines it is pretty shocking.

The sickest thing, of course, is the Eyes are happy to serve. Some of the female slaves used for this purpose get raped and tossed back out into the field, and act like they were rewarded. Batarians are fucking sick, Ivan.

Dealing with these infiltrators is tricky, because you'll never know ahead of time when one is about to pop out on you. In a fight they're not that durable – most are civilians – but they will have highly enhanced strength and speed. A good shotgun will inflict enough shock and trauma to shut down most of their bionetic implants.

The threat of these things is very high. One of them almost killed me, back on Reglius, when I was in charge of the training facility there. Broke my jaw and swept me, and could have killed me if I hadn't caught them with a flash bang. If they get the drop on you – and they will – I'd rate them at _.9 Aherns_ since their punches and speed are no joke.

* * *

That's it, Ivan. I'd do a longer series, but I have to get Ana to medical before we ship out. I'll hit you again once you respond and I'm settled in on the Citadel.


	3. Elcor

**_A/N:_** _The next chapter of TWCD is currently with the editing team. Hopefully it will be out tomorrow._

 _The Enraged are basically elcor Angry Marines. Always Angry. All the time._

* * *

 **FROM : FLEET MASTER, SOL, FIRST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV**

 **TO: FIFTH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN**

 **ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED**

 **ROUTING: SOLMAINCOMMS → ARCRELCOM → CITFLTCOM**

 **CHECKSUM VERIFIED**

 **SUBJECT: ELCOR SPECTRE**

Tradius. Your report on batarians was very well done. The SIU piece was information I did not know.

The Eyes were disturbing. But nothing the batarians do surprises me any more. They are not even animals. I disagree that we did not exterminate them in the wake of the collapse of the Hegemony.

Ultimately what we do about the Batarian Empire is more in the hands of the Council now than High Command. I have already made my recommendations, and I have already been ignored. _As usual._

AIS is bothersome again, agitated over this elcor Spectre submission. I get the politics behind it. Elcor fleet is now nearly the size of our own, and their economy has grown rapidly over the past few years. With the volus whining, the Council has to make some kind of point of what level of power is required to be a player in the Game.

The volus fucked themselves with their stupidity, dealing with the turians. Still, the timing...curious. And I have no clear idea of what elcor bring to the table. I am not familiar with elcor ground military forces... fleets, yes, but not elite combatants.

Not sure how things who walk on hands would have elite combatants in the first place.

Enlighten me.

* * *

 **FROM : FIFTH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN**

 **TO: FLEET MASTER, SOL, FIRST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV**

 **ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED**

 **ROUTING: CITFLTCOM → ARCRELCOM → SOLMAINCOMMS**

 **CHECKSUM VERIFIED**

 **SUBJECT: AH, SHIT**

An Elcor Spectre? Are you fucking shitting me?

I knew the Council was stupid, but... really? This shit isn't even _subtle_ now. I'm beginning to think Tela's rants about how stupid they are were actually an understatement.

Anyway, most people tend to fucking overlook the elcor. Elcor don't act or **think** like the other races. They tend to take their time, never rushing anything, and rely a lot on VI-controlled combat systems to make up for their lack of reaction time. Everyone 'knows' the elcor don't have the temperament to react quickly to rapidly shifting situations.

And if you actually _believe_ that bullshit, I have a tropical rain forest to sell you on motherfucking Rakhana.

People underestimate the elcor, _badly_. Both on paper and in practice, the elcor military is **the** most powerful in terms of individual strength. They don't have the numbers or the economics to really project power, but the elcor have  NEVER lost an infantry battle. Not a single one.

Idiots see the elcor as weak because their Lifemasters are drugged up to the gills and their society is almost as silly as the goddamned hanar seem to be. My reply to that is the hanar whipped the ass of the entire galaxy several times and act like it's a fucking joke, and so _maybe the elcor shouldn't be fucked with._

That being said... the elcor aren't as dangerous to us humans as others are. They're pretty laid back most times, and they don't really connect 'warfare' with 'politics', so honestly the only reason you have to fight them is you did something intolerably fucking stupid.

The elcor 'mindset' sees violence as pointless but necessary. Their druggie Lifemasters place combat and violence in the same kind of 'life requirements' as farming and engineering work – something you have to do in order to get results.

I'm not a goddamned cultural anthropologist, so I can't say much about it except the bottom line is their soldiers don't give a shit what they do. Things we could call 'atrocities' they just shrug at. They don't take prisoners – or _surrenders_ – and they don't give up or fall back themselves. They don't go out of their way to cause collateral damage (except for the Enraged) but nor do they give a shit if it happens.

The most dangerous thing about fighting elcor is they don't see war as a tool of political gain or pressure or even a deterrent. To them, if you're stupid enough to actually force them to fight, then its best you die completely so they can get back to fucking, drugging and dancing.

Elcor soldiers wear heavy powered armor, and have shoulder mounted weapons that do indeed use VI-systems, drones and laser locks to fire rapidly. But they can also target manually. Elcor fight defensively for the most part, with lots of use of heavy mechs and drones to make up for their lack of mobility otherwise.

The elcor have a basic military volunteer group – the Life Militia – but those aren't professional soldiers. In general, like I said, they see this as a task, and most of them aren't very interested in it, just like not a lot of humans are all fired up about being pest exterminators.

My descriptions of their soldiers are very detailed in terms of the weapon loadouts and what not. Keep in mind, these loadouts were of fifteen years ago, but I doubt they changed much. I'm going into so much detail because the elcor don't really change up how they fight so much as what they're equipped to fight with. Having the AIS verify the loadouts is probably a wise idea.

* * *

 **LIFEWARDEN**

There's no such thing as 'heavy infantry' in the elcor forces. They're all classed as superheavy infantry, with armor and shields that wouldn't be out of place on most tanks, and servo-controlled weapons that we would class as either anti-material or anti-tank.

The Life Militia is volunteer, but the serious fuckers who actually like being soldiers are allowed to join the formal army after a five year term. These are called Lifewardens, and they're given serious warmaking gear.

Each one is wearing a mass-effect powered augmented battle-suit, with multiple kinetic shields and an array of deployable omni-armor panels. This suit ups their already ridiculous strength and allows them to stand upright for short periods of time. The weapons are ion bombards – for anti-mech work – and twin rotary particle-packet mass accelerator minguns with computer-controlled aiming.

On the back they have a slimline five-pack of M/AM missiles and their rear flanks can deploy mini-missile drones and ECM drones. A single one of these big bastards can put out about as much firepower as a HAMMRHEAD tank, and take nearly as much damage.

Lifewardens move pretty slowly, but only on their homeworld, which is a planet of three G's. On most worlds settled by use the fuckers can move really, _really_ rapidly since it's like being on the moon for us. Their suits also remove them having to worry about falling over, and nothing is scarier than a herd of Lifewardens trampling your forces.

I saw these guys in battle in the time I did bullshit with REACHBACK, fighting some pirates on Kaldon VI. The pirates had old turian battle trucks and a line of missile launchers, and outnumbered the Lifewardens three to one. The elcor just charged through the incoming fire and unloaded everything on them, them trampled the rest until they broke and ran.

Lifewardens fight defensively most of the time, and are unusually careful about making a mess or killing civilians. If they can break a foe with sheer panic and drive him off without killing, they will - but they won't hesitate to fight if things get bad.

Tactics? Ugh, that's a mess. Humans really aren't setup very well to fight things like this. Our best bet is to treat them like a tank division and use heavy air support and artillery to break up their lines, then suppression fire with heavy weapons to pin them in place for the artillery to finish them off.

Threat? A unit is ten elcor... which is basically ten tanks. I'm a badass but even I can't face off ten tanks by myself. Call it 12 Aherns for a whole unit, and about one to two for individuals.

* * *

 **THE ENRAGED**

Elcor don't like to fight. It takes a certain mindset to will themselves to want to kill. They don't have a problem with fighting defensively, or fighting to kill if pushed into a stampede, but not many of them want to 'move away from the cores of life' or whatever the fuck the Lifemasters are pushing in their drug cocktails.

Most of the Lifewardens get sick of killing pretty quick – almost all of them retire after ten years. Those who have grown to like it, though, are moved into a different program. They're called the Enraged.

There's a reason why.

In terms of loadout, they're not much different than Lifewardens – the suits are identical in terms of armor, speed, etc. But there's more of a focus on area-of-effect weapons. The missiles are replaced with a rapid-fire ion bombardment array, the shoulder guns are upgraded to 9mm heavy accelerator cannons fitted with explosive shells, and the flanks have servo-arms, two to a side, each equipped with heavy miniguns.

The biggest difference is that the Enraged don't deploy defensively. They are launched in drop-assault style impact pods, which themselves are equipped with heavy shielding, ECM and flares. These are fired directly into the ranks of the enemy along with powerful ion bombardment blasts and disorienting chemical shells, and when they hit a series of explosive strips on the pod detonate, scattering shrapnel out in all directions.

The Enraged then get out and begin laying waste to everything around them. They're pretty brutal – instead of fighting to drive enemies off, they are out to kill or wound as many combatants as possible. Also unlike Lifewardens, they don't give a shit about collateral damage, or civilian casualties, or even friendly fire.

The Enraged are blown on special combat drugs, from what I've been told – and you can only _imagine_ what kind of fucked up shit an elcor would consider 'combat drugs'.

The drawback is that the Enraged rely more heavily on VI control and targeting since they're so fuckangry they just kill anything they see. That makes them a LOT more vulnerable to counter tactics than the Lifewardens are... then again, when the fuckers are INSIDE your lines and blowing shit up in all directions, tactics are going to be difficult to apply.

The best tactics are to shoot the fuckers out of the sky before they land, which is not an easy proposition, or to rapidly fallback from the landing sites while dropping mines as you go. Once the assholes are already up in your shit, it's going to be nothing but massacre, and there's no brakes on the rape train if they can reach your fuel dumps or command center.

The Enraged don't deploy in groups, each one fights singly. Given they're basically berzerkers, they're less dangerous to a prepared, calm opponent than the Lifewardens. I'd give each one a solid 1 Ahern.

* * *

 **HOPEBEARER**

The equivalent of an elcor battle medic mixed with combat engineer, Hopebearers are slightly heavily armored than their companions. On the other hand, their battle-suits are designed for heavy defense.

They only have a single light concussion grenade launcher and an ion bombard as weaponry, but they can deploy up to fifteen combat drones at at time. Their armor contains a dozen info-hardened VI's designed to counter infowar and hacking attempts, as well as deployable nano-ware repair drones.

Six heavy articulated arms on the frame of the armor itself can each deploy a nine-foot circular omni-shield, and they carry almost fifty gallons of omni-gel for field fortifications. The front of their armor has a powerful comms link setup as well as a number of various infowar kits.

The back of the elcor is taken up with a medical support system, along with five medical support drones that can inject medigel and apply omni-gel sutures to wounds. Hopebearers are trained in medical support and their armor also tends to have spaces on it for carrying blood plasma and other medical equipment.

Each Hopebearer is defended by a pair of quadrupedal combat mechs, which are basically heavy flak cannons on four legs with a kinetic barrier generator. The barrier is thirty feet in diameter and is rated at over five thousand TeV, strong enough to stand off even heavy fire. The two mechs can also carry extra medical supplies and combat drones.

Hopebearers are seeded among the ranks of the Lifewardens, each one supporting a pair of Lifewarden teams. They prefer to hang back behind the lines, and use their capabilities to enhance the defensive preparations of any elcor force. That being said, almost all Hopebearers were once Lifewardens themselves, and they can certainly fight if forced.

Tactically speaking, you always kill the medic first. Taking these bastards out is the only chance you have at stopping a determined elcor force, as otherwise these fuckers will patch up the armor and heal the wounds you inflict in no time flat while setting up increasingly tough defenses and drowning you in literal clouds of combat drones and infowar attacks.

Taking one out isn't that hard. The concussion grenades can be nasty, but the field of fire is limited. I'd give a single one of these things a rating of .1 Aherns.

* * *

 **FREAKS AND WEIRDOS : THE LOST**

The Enraged are drugged up thrill-killers whose idea of subtle is putting a slightly long delay on the fusion explosive. While hard to kill, they aren't exactly a good choice in many military situations.

The Elcor's idea of 'heavy infantry', on the other hand, is just so fucked up that I don't know where to goddamned begin. I think they probably got the basic idea from the Turian Final Line soldier, but then some Lifemaster got high as fuck and ended up with this … thing.

Enraged that get shot to pieces are send back to Dekunna for 'recovery and reflection'. Most of them are given some kind of druggie bullshit that cleans them out and return to civilian life. But a few are so fucked in the head that the Lifemasters decided not to fix them up at all.

They're fed a cocktail of psychotropic drugs, combat enhancers, and are implanted with control chips synced with a very high-order combat VI. Their bodies are cybernetically enhanced, with all critical organs removed, sealed into heavily armored tubes, and reinserted. Their entire skeletal structure is overlaid with heavy metals and shock absorbers and a light mass core is placed in their chest to offset the weight.

These poor bastards are then subjected to a full YEAR of combat simulations while in a healing coma, running through thousands of battles in their mind along with the VI. As they heal from their operations, weapons and additional armor is grafted to their form.

Once they wake up, they're given an over sized suit of combat armor that is basically an elcor battle-suit. The things are quadrupedal and are twelve feet tall at the shoulder. The battle-suit is tied into their nervous system and the VI, and is equipped with every manner of hot flaming death the elcor could dream up.

The suit can 'kneel' and deploy hover-plates to move rapidly, or use its legs for difficult terrain. The legs themselves are completely encircled with deployable monomolecular tangle wire to slice apart infantry. The suit can 'run' at over fifty miles an hour without tiring.

There are two heavy omni-generators on the belly of the mech, each one capable of generating powerful omni-shields. And the suit itself has a high-capacity kinetic barrier system rivaling that of most system patrol boats. Adding to the shitfuckery, it boasts SIX high-energy phase disruptors and four wide-area phase inhibitors, making it nearly immune to most direct biotic attack.

The 'front shoulders' are larger than the back. The sides are taken up by five-pack heavy M/AM saturation missiles, the centerline of the shoulders each mounts a pair of independently targetable turian lance cannons. An articulated arm drops down from the shoulder to deploy a rapid-fire ion bombard.

The rear shoulders are occupied by a larger set of articulated arms ending in a ball turret equipped with triple rapid-fire long range mass cannons. Hanging from the sides are heavy military drone launchers – the system can generate and control over twenty at at time. The entire length of the back is occupied with mass stabilizers and the firing platform for a frigate-class cut down mass accelerator.

This monstrous thing can blast apart a Shieldbreaker or Adept battle-suit in a single shot, and one of them wrecked a salarian tank by ramming the fucking thing. As you probably imagine, the resources to build and maintain this behemoth are not insignificant, and they are rarely deployed openly.

They are called the Lost. And they are mainly used as anchor points in an assault, blasting open defenses and sweeping lesser attackers away in completely fucking terrifying sprays of missiles and blasts from the main gun.

The Lost don't have names. Officially, each one is legally dead. When they aren't fighting they are placed into drug-induced slumbers and continue fighting battles in their fugue state.

Facing these things is a nightmare. Each one has been fighting – at least in their mind – nonstop for the compressed equivalent of decades. The elcor feed their simulations with every scrap of combat footage and doctrine they can gather, so almost no kind of tactical feinting will work – the Lost have seen it all.

The armor they wear is in excess of six inches thick – there is not a single fucking weapon on the market aside from Hydra missile launchers that will even dent this shit. Recently, I heard they started plating it with Silaris armor, which makes things even worse. A conventional combat unit is literally fucking helpless fighting this thing.

Biotics won't do jack shit to it unless they can overpower the defenses, and even then only the strongest biotic attacks would do more than scorch the armor. The asari's Adept rail gun can penetrate the armor but in a one-on-one fight wouldn't even get into range to do so, the main gun outranges every ground weapon except for most artillery guns by a factor of three.

Even artillery is difficult to deploy, given they can shift into a hover-tank mode and move in excess of ninety miles an hour. Their missile systems and the lance cannons make taking one out from aerial attack very, very chancy.

Direct combat with heavy tank units works best, but even there you'll have to absorb a high rate of units destroyed before you can begin taking the fight to the mech.

The good news is the elcor only have, at last count, about twenty of these monsters currently active. The bad news is that the AIS suspects they have more – maybe dozens more – in a state of hibernation.

I haven't seen one in action in person, but I've seen video footage. They took part in the Second Krogan Rebellion, the only contribution the elcor made. Six of the things obliterated the entire Vheldic Clan on Regha, over ten thousand krogan. I've attached the file.

It's not even a fucking massacre. They blew the fuck out of the krogan, then set fire to the birthing areas and killed all the females. When the krogan actually tried to surrender, they shot them down without even breaking stride. The Citadel Council actually censured the elcor for this, and they haven't been deployed since...

And hopefully it stays that way.

Fighting one of these things? On foot? Go fuck yourself. The only one of the Lost that was destroyed was by a pirate group that crashed a goddamned light cruiser into the ground.

That isn't to say they're invulnerable. The best bet, given limited resources and weapons loads, is probably some form of infowarfare and hacking attack. Disabling the onboard VI should, in theory, lock up the mech and make the poor bastard inside much less effective. Mines could work, especially if they are tied to other things – avalanches, blowing up a dam, or collapsing a lava tube.

Getting into close range with the thing is difficult, but the main gun is not fully articulated – the entire mech has to turn to aim it in the rough direction. It has a minimum range of about eighty meters, although inside that range you're going to be a sitting duck for all the REST of the weapons. Still, assuming you could get into close enough range in a battle-suit you might be able to cripple the legs if you had a strong enough weapon.

I can't really rate this one using the Ahern system. I don't honestly think I could beat one on foot without serious preparation and having certain conditions in place, and in a battle-suit I'd probably lose my ass off as well. Even a coordinated assault with air assets, artillery and tanks could fail. Give it a full twenty Aherns and let's try not to piss off the Elcor.


	4. Krogan

**FROM: 5TH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN**

 **TO: FLEET MASTER, SOL, 1ST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV**

 **ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED**

 **ROUTING: CITFLTCOM → ARCRELCOM → SOLMAINCOMMS**

 _ **CHECKSUM VERIFIED. KEY VERIFIED. DECRYPTING**_

 **SUBJECT: Fucking morons**

* * *

I had my first command level meeting today with the fleet captains, and what in fuck was Hackett even doing with this pack of clowns? I wouldn't let some of these stupid bastards run a rubber duck in a bathtub, much less a cruiser. No wonder we got our ass handed to us by the geth.

I'm also finding some disturbing links deep in the data files left behind. I looked around for the stuff you mentioned, and you were right – Hackett was moving AIS assets and fleet patrols away from the areas Cerberus was active in before Shepard took 'em out.

Haven't had a chance to follow up on everything yet, but it's worrisome. Hackett's too goddamned rich to be on the take, he's apolitical as I am, and he clearly wasn't spending his fucking time training his people properly. If I was a more suspicious person, I'd think someone ordered him to weaken 5th Fleet on purpose.

I'm not going to say much else here. Next time we do a command meet, find me after.

At any rate, got your TTL flash, and no, I haven't forgotten. Buried in paperwork up to my goddamned eyes, and about to throw my worthless hack of a comm officer out a tall window, but I didn't forget.

Krogan, huh? Guess this is due to that mess that went down on Kalsur, with the Rictus?

Krogan aren't like other aliens, I'll tell you that right now. Sure, most of them have a thing for doing dumb shit like charging headlong into incoming fire and wave assault tactics, but there's a reason for that – they can shrug off damage that would leave a human soldier a goddamned splotch on the ground.

Most krogan fall into one of three groups – crazy, stupid, or dangerous. Stop laughing, it's not like the krogan have a fucking formal military order.

* * *

 **Stupid Krogan**

'Stupid' krogan are your everyday humpback numbskulls. Most of 'em in this day and age are either mercs for hire or gangers in the Blood Pack or Rictus. I call them stupid because they haven't really absorbed anything about how to fight from other races. Stupid krogan will almost always rely on the same patterns – an initial charge, close-range shotgun and melee work, and relying on armor and regeneration to shrug off wounds.

Don't get me wrong. Your average human soldier – or turian or asari or salarian – is not packing even close to enough firepower to down a young krogan, much less any of the vets. The dumbest krogan can take a full burst from an Avenger and keep coming. They have multiple hearts behind bone plates, backup organs for everything, and rapid regeneration – you don't have to fight smart if you can ignore ninety percent of what's being thrown your way.

Plasma, fire, acid, and explosives are the only things guaranteed to put them down. A krogan survived crashing his ship right into a mountain from orbit. One survived being thrown in an honest-to-God blast furnace; another was shot seventeen times by anti-material rifles before going down. The stupid ones can be handled with traps, explosives, and proper tactics – but if they close range on your forces, it's fucking over.

Even if you do manage to hurt them, that's not always enough. Hurt a krogan bad enough, and he goes into what they call a blood rage. Regeneration rates increase, adrenaline floods the system, natural painkillers get dumped into his body, and his organs go into overdrive.

A single krogan is dangerous, but can usually be crippled and killed in short order. Mines are good to break their charges, so are snipers. What the stupid krogan are good at, however, is attacking in groups, where you have to split your fire and it becomes too weak to stop their charge.

I had to drop a group of Blood Pack during that mess with Thana T'Armal, and even a group of them don't even rate a **full Ahern**.

* * *

 **Crazy Krogan**

Some of the krogan are a lot more fucked in the head than the rest of them are. Krogan are split up into clans, who spend most of their time boasting, fighting, drinking, stealing chicks from each other, and other shit the rest of us outgrew after college.

But some of the clans are scary to even other krogan. Weyrloc and Drau come to mind. These krogan are seriously fucked up – Weyrloc was some kind of big shot warrior clan back during the Rebellions, and they're all big corn-fed bastards larger than other krogan by a good thirty centimeters or more. Weyrloc krogan go into the blood rage at will, and have rituals and training to actually fight well using it.

Drau is what you get when krogan get suicidal. It's not a blood-related clan, like most of them are. No, Drau is the outcast clan, when you're too crazy and aggressive to even hang out with the Blood Pack. The worrying thing about the Drau is they think if they don't die in battle they are cursed, and none of them give a shit about dying – they might wave at Death as it passes by.

Both clans are widespread off and on Tuchanka, and are even harder for conventional forces to fight than regular krogan. Weyrloc in a blood rage take a stupid amount of firepower to stop, much less kill, and Drau have no compunctions about loading themselves down with antimatter torpedo warheads and charging right into an enemy's main lines.

It doesn't fucking help that both clans are actually a lot more skilled at fighting than most krogan. Weyrloc specializes in heavy machine guns and explosives, while Drau goes for suicide bombers, old-fashioned swords, and superheavy shotguns. Getting into close-range with either group is simply a no-no.

Crazies are harder to put a rating on, depending on if they're crazy smart or crazy stupid. Say a group is **1 Ahern** and leave it at that.

* * *

 **Dangerous Krogan**

The most dangerous krogan clan, bar none, are the Ganar, followed very closely by the Thax and the ever-fucking Talyth.

The Ganar are what most people would call 'civilized' krogan. Most of 'em are Citadel citizens, speak Galactic Trade Asari, and don't run around acting like idiots. A good third of the clan lives in Asari Space and has asari relatives, and their boss, Okeer, is not only older than human history, but was the guy who kicked off the Genophage.

Needless to say, Ganar krogan don't get along with other krogan very well. You can throw out all the shit you think you know about krogan fighting when it comes to these guys. They use heavy weapons, but also shit you'd never imagine krogan using – omni-drones, ion bombards, traps. Hell, Okeer himself even uses a sniper rifle.

Ganar is tight with the asari, so they usually don't get up to trouble in Citadel Space, but in the Traverse they're boogeymen. They are what passes for krogan doctors and scientists, and their idea of 'experiments' is 'go kidnap and cut up on other krogan.' Again, this doesn't endear them to the average krogan.

Most of the Ganar were personally trained by Okeer, who is hands down the single scariest sonofabitch I've ever had the displeasure to meet. Not kidding here, Ivan, Okeer could probably take me out in ten seconds or less, even if I had prep time. He popped up during my Spectre trial, and is the only reason me or Tela is still alive – we dropped that cybered-up krogan nutjob they sent, but they also had a trio of failed Remembrance Dancers.

He killed them all, by himself, in melee. Fuck. That. Ganar krogan fight smart and most of them are tougher than even other krogan. Call any fight with any Ganar a solid **1 Ahern**.

Thax is a clan of krogan who are clearly insane, as they focus on merchant shit and trading. The only krogan who like the volus, Thax krogan are always calm and don't have the blood rage like most krogan do. They are the only thing keeping Tuchanka fed these days; they sell their labor off for money and build survival suits and other things to bring in cash.

If you push a Thax into a fight, don't be surprised when a pack of mercenaries or some other fucked up alien freak show pops in – Thax consider fighting non-krogan beneath them, and use mercenaries liberally. Thax is also rich enough to have even their junior members kitted out in custom armor, top-quality weapons, and tons of grenades and other toys. Most of 'em are about **0.5 Aherns** , I'd say, but they don't roll solo and – like I said – who knows what kind of fucking mercs they'll have as backup.

The Talyth are so crazy and weird even the Ganar avoid them. The clan (along with Ganar) refused the Krogan Emperor when the Rebellions kicked off. To this day, most of them live in small groups on krogan colony worlds, and almost never go to Tuchanka. What makes them dangerous is that they decided that if aliens beat them, they should be more like the aliens.

Sadly, their role models were fucking turian.

The Talyth have an honor system kind of like the birds do, but it is pretty messed up in some ways. Talyth will regularly use omni-tech, hire quarians on Pilgrimage to teach them hacking, and are a goddamned pain in the ass to fight since they like to build customized battle-suits.

No two suits are alike, passed down from generation to generation – some of them date back to the Rebellions. Unlike most battle-suits, these aren't designed to mount vehicle-class weapons in a mobile platform – these are _melee_ battle-suits, and since they're sized for krogan, you have no idea how fucked up it is to see an MBT get batted away by a fuck-all giant robot with a mace the size of a main power junction on a cruiser.

* * *

 **Freaks and Weirdos : Warlords**

The very first thing you always need to know about krogan leaders is that they are usually biotics. And krogan biotics play rough.

Krogan are divided up into, from what I understand, clans and warbands. A clan is usually a bunch of krogan who are either distantly related or adopted into it, while a warband is a collection of clans led by a strong warrior called a warlord.

Krogan warlords are created by a ritual where they fuck the krogan up and stuff him full of eezo and other shit. It's something the salarians came up with way back before the Rebellions, but the krogan have kept doing it since. Warlords are weaker in biotic strength than natural krogan biotics (the battlemasters), but are designed for combat.

Most warlords give up their clan names when they become leaders, and they're hard as nails to fight. A warlord has to be badass enough to convince krogan battlemasters, some of the toughest sonsofbitches in the galaxy, to follow them. This translates into a fucking killing machine of a krogan.

Warlords use heavy armor and weapons, and most of their biotics is combat focused. They usually don't lead the charges, but don't think that means they won't get right up in the middle of combat if they have to. Warlords prefer ranged weapons – heavy shotguns and explosives – and the use of biotic attacks rather than melee, but they aren't bad at that either.

I have not had nearly enough blows to the head to even try to fight one of these roided-up fuckers in combat, but you remember what happened to Piotrus at Halcae 6, when the batarians hired krogan mercs led by a warlord. Piotrus hit the krogan with everything he had and didn't even slow him down, and the warlord killed him and six other Ns before Delacor took him out with sniping.

Call it **3 Aherns** and instruct your people to use heavy explosives when you can.

* * *

 **Freaks and Weirdos : Battlemasters**

While warlords lead warbands into battle, most clans are run by battlemasters, natural krogan biotics and leaders. Battlemasters are a diverse lot – some focus on melee, some on biotics, some on tactics, but no matter what flavor you're dealing with, most of them are old, very experienced, and have the raw power (if not the skill) of an asari matriarch.

Battlemasters usually don't get into the fights that much – they're responsible for leading the entire clan in a number of ways, and are the krogan equivalent of generals mixed with politicians, I guess. That being said, they're a fuck of a lot more dangerous than warlords are, because their biotic power is stronger and in most cases they have an entire clan backing them.

Most battlemasters break the normal krogan mold in one way or another – a few of 'em train with aliens, others get into shit like vehicles, some cut deals with the Thax for better equipment. None of them are boneheaded idiots who charge in blindly.

The big-shot battlemasters – Weyrloc Jhan, Urdnot Wrex, Gatatog Uvenk, and Khel Burrum – are all well over a thousand years old and have survived shit that would kill most people dead on the spot. Jhan fought in the Rachni Wars and survived, Wrex helped take down Benezia and nearly killed Saren, Uvenk beat the shit out of a turian Praetor.

Burrum trained for a while at Pinnacle, part of a program the SA had to expose us to alien militaries. He's the only one I know personally. Smart for a krogan, tough and doesn't lose his head in a fight. I sparred with him more than once and I honestly don't think I could take him.


	5. Quarians

**A/N:** _I had some of this done already. Still recovering from back issues._

 _Edited since Vicodin made me forget Shepard was dead by the time this was written._

* * *

 **FROM: FLEET MASTER, SOL, 1ST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV**

 **TO: 5TH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN**

 **ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED**

 **ROUTING: SOLMAINCOMMS → ARCRELCOM → CITFLTCOM**

 _ **CHECKSUM VERIFIED. KEY VERIFIED. DECRYPTING**_

 **SUBJECT: Need vodka?**

You are actually astonished at the Hack being an incompetent asshole? Or perhaps you are being drunk?

I do not know what he was doing. I was told repeatedly to keep my nose out of 5th Fleet. The only real dealings I am having with him was when Shepard decided to kill our entire Prothean research corpus with her acting on Feros and then blabbed to the Council about it…

I know you were impressed with the girl, but still, professional she was not.

No matter. The past is past. Whatever Old Man Branson was up to is over now, and his son is unlikely to use the same tools. Hackett is being watched, I am assuring you of this.

On to my actual question.

Krogan are a matter of concern, usually due to mercenary reinforcement in various actions we have to take on border areas or deep pursuit of pirates. I did not know krogan had battle-suits and am drinking very heavily to try and drown this fact from my brain. Damn you.

Since you are being settled in with a nicety by now, I am wanting to turn your attention to quarians. We are to begin cooperative operations with them next month and I find myself completely ignorant as to their methods.

Since your Shepard worked with them in the stupidity that was the Benezia Incident perhaps you are having some insight?

* * *

 **FROM: 5TH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN**

 **TO: FLEET MASTER, SOL, 1ST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV**

 **ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED**

 **ROUTING: CITFLTCOM → ARCRELCOM → SOLMAINCOMMS**

 _ **CHECKSUM VERIFIED. KEY VERIFIED. DECRYPTING**_

 **SUBJECT: Quarians? Really?**

First off, go fuck yourself. If you knew the stupid bastard was dirty, political fallout or no, you should have gutted Hackett like a fish. You wouldn't believe how fucked up 5th Fleet was, and now they gave the bastard 2nd Fleet to run into the ground?

You can watch him all you want, and sure, I'd put watchers on him, stat.

But the fuck are you doing even letting politics fuck with shit like that in the fleet anyway? Your whole job is to isolate the High Admiralty from the political crap so we don't end up with a bigger mess.

The upside is, I guess, this is probably over with. Unless you think someone told him to fuck up 5th Fleet _on purpose_ since it was our 'contribution' to the Citadel Fleet, which is so fucking depressing I can't be bothered to imagine it is the truth.

I won't comment on that bullshit that happened on Feros except to say there are lines, Ivan, and while it may make sense and even save lives to cross them, there's always fallout and consequences. I may not agree with everything Shepard has done, but I will say she took actions based on reasons that I, for one, approve of. The whole reason I never bothered fighting being stuck in Pinnacle is that it was a way to avoid having to make those hard decisions that haunt me for years.

Anyway… _quarians_.

One of the more fucked up events that happened at Pinnacle was that Shepard wanted two aliens trained as Alliance officers. I have no fucking clue how in hell that got shoved through BUPERS, and I'm sure as shit not going to comment on who in the name of God, Jesus, and the Twelve Apostles had the horsepower to get them commissioned. (Senator Adkins, maybe?)

One of them was Tali'Zorah, Admiral Rael'Zorah's only kid. Good kid. Bit dim when it comes to not standing in front of a goddamned killing machine of a Spectre and getting your leg torn off as a result, but smart and learns well.

I had five weeks to fix her fuckups as best I could, which was a sore point with me since she had this stupid idea in her head that she could take care of herself. A kid in a suit I wouldn't trust against spitballs where a breach could kill you dead, and she thinks she's a badass.

In the course of training her I made some inroads with the quarian military, asking some questions and got a hold of some quarian Fleet Marine electronic training manuals.

My quick answer: let's not fuck around and piss them off.

Quarians have the ugly distinction of having a dual-tier society: the military elite, and everyone not good enough to be in the military. Every other race has a small fraction of the race in arms (well, except the fucking turians.)

But the quarians have well over thirty percent of their entire population serving, and they have a pretty long and ugly tradition of combat.

The quarian military is split between the Fleet Admiralty (ship commanders, fleet commands, etc.) and the Marines (ground and boarding units). The Fleet Marines are mostly defensive types, while the ground Marines are more offensive.

* * *

 **Quarians in General**

Four things make quarians stand out in my book: mobility, shock power, combat engineering, and morale.

With the possible exception of the Heavy Marines, quarians aren't big on heavy armor or defenses. They prefer to use cover, defensive barricades and mobility to avoid being hit at all rather than trying to soak damage. This makes sense, given a fucking single sick turian sneezing on them could kill them if they have a suit breach, and they have limited funds to fix things.

As a result, most quarian Marines are pretty mobile on the battlefield, and have a good mastery of cover traversion. A drawback of this is not just lighter defenses, it is a mindset that fixed defensive battles are bad and to be avoided. A quarian commander who lets his people get pinned down into a corner is seen as an idiot, because their fighting style doesn't work real hot that way.

Quarians embrace offensive tactics because their weapons support it. With only rare exceptions, after all, quarians have only fucking fought for the most part in space boarding actions and the like, where long-range is hardly useful. Most quarian electro-plasma weapons are fairly short ranged, but they will carve armor like it's not even there and roast any bastard stupid enough to try to charge them head-on. Most quarian attack plans have a very heavy element of shock and surprise when possible.

Quarian combat engineering and skill with drones and omni-tech is astounding. Tali was a fucking kid, barely trained by quarian terms, and she could hack through NOVA-level encryption and pass the full Lieutenant Commander Engineering Qualification Exam, Level Five. Most of them have more engineering capability (and experience) than anything outside of a dedicated engineering group.

Quarians use drones very heavily, along with omni-mines, mini-missiles, and various tricks and booby-traps. While this is kinda stupid when fighting geth (a point I had to make repeatedly to Tali's thick skull), against more normal foes you can forget a clean fight. Your armor will be sabotaged, your medi-gel will spray into your fucking faceplate, your ammo will cook off as your heatsinks eject, and pray to God you didn't link your waste elimination system into your omni-tool or you may need a colostomy bag.

Quarian morale and unit cohesion is also very high. Quarians don't rely on anyone else, and drill into their troops that they leave no one behind for any reason. You can forget trying to break them in battle – most of them trained with the knowledge that if they fell, their entire species might go extinct. I don't know how they even walk given the size of the balls it must have taken to run a rickety pack of shit ships like their fleet into the Battle of the Citadel.

All of this adds up to a pretty ugly package. On a field battle, with heavy vehicle support and terrain, quarians are going to be fucking useless. In any kind of space boarding, station combat, or most urban combat situations, quarians are going to be terrifying.

In the event our leadership does something stupid enough to make us have to fight them, they have some weakness, particularly medical. Quarians aren't wimpy like salarians, but they can't take severe suit breaches without dangers. A suit breach exposes them to outside contaminants and their immune systems go haywire. Sometimes they have allergic responses that can kill them, other times their immune system shuts down completely and germs kill them. Either way, a suit breach often removes a quarian from battle completely.

Tactically, quarians are best countered with low-tech options, close quarters battle, and heavy artillery, which are things they don't have any familiarity with. They have very good snipers and decent riflemen, but aside from the Techmarines, they're light on defensive forces.

* * *

 **Admiralty Marines and Admiralty Agents**

From my understanding from the manuals and talking with people, the Marines that serve on the Fleet ships as defenders are called 'Admiralty Marines' and the personal guards and troubleshooters of the Admirals are 'Agents.' Both of them can be identified by all-white bodysuits with a reik of cross-barred white and black instead of family colors.

Admiralty forces mostly protect the Admiral, command systems, comms systems, and act as the quarian version of both intelligence agents and special forces. Notably apolitical (and this in a culture where fucking who you get to sleep with is political), they form the backbone of the Admiralty's power, an independent military arm inside the military.

Unlike most QFM, the Admiralty grunts pack lighter-weight weapons like SMGs and pistols, heavier armor, and are the most likely to have cybernetic alterations, something most quarians shy away from.

I'm not sure how skilled they are, giving them an Ahern rating would be problematic as neither I nor anyone I know has ever fought them. From what little I've picked up, though, I'd say they're at least as good as a basic N, so they're not pushovers.

Tactics? They're just very tough, experienced quarian Marines. Use of CQB units, rushes, and sustained firing pressure will take down anything eventually.

* * *

 **Techmarines**

The quarian combat engineers need a mention of their own, because they're goddamned terrifying.

Called Techmarines, these are quarian battle engineers, trained heavily in both combat and in a wide array of engineering tasks, from sabotage and combat systems to repairing damaged equipment in a firefight. Techmarines are also all trained firefighters, medics, zero-g combat specialists, and most of 'em embrace cybernetics to a degree the rest of the race finds utterly creepy – most of them push forty percent or more.

Techmarines are rarely deployed in force, most often being distributed through quarian Fleet Marine forces as a force multiplier or attached for support. Given the wide range of the shit they can do, this isn't surprising.

We saw what these little bastards could do during the Battle of the Citadel, where they were busy counter-hacking the geth and saving people left and right. Most of them use heavy or squad-level weapons, as they tend to be supported by at least a platoon-equivalent of regular Marines. This allows them to hang back and use their skills.

Ivan, I can't stress enough how goddamned stupid it would be to let combat engineers of this caliber operate freely without counter. There's footage of them on the Citadel setting up multi-linked omni-barriers of some kind which could fully repel multiple hits from a plasma mortar, were capable of medevacing humans, asari, turians, and salarians and providing advanced medical care, and running a set of combat hack-scripts that kept the geth from jamming comms and overloading suit armors.

They are trained to do this kind of thing under fire, which most combat engineering teams can't do. For that alone I'd give a team **1 Ahern**. It's a pity I won't be running Pinnacle anymore; I'd be very interested in putting a pack of these guys into a simulation and seeing what they can do.

From a tactical viewpoint countering them would be ugly. They dig in hard enough that artillery and sniping is out, and rushing a hardened defensive position with CQB assets just gets you dead guys. Biotic assault, as much as I hate to suggest it, is the only thing that really works here, as the quarians don't have biotics. Even then, however, they have pretty good anti-biotic defenses – adepts would be better than rushing them with furies or vanguards.

* * *

 **Heavy Marine**

The quarians didn't have much use for 'heavy infantry,' seeing as that's mostly a product of races who get involved in planetary combat. Most heavy infantry are a liability in boarding actions – their heavy weapons punch through the hull (bad), their bulky size means they have problems moving around (worse), and for the expense of one such heavy infantryman you could field five or six scouts and lightly armed combatants which would be more useful.

That being said, the Admiralty isn't a bunch of shortsighted stupid bastards. They realized long ago that one day they'd have to get into a real slugging match with the geth, and they'd need some pretty scary shit to face them down with.

Their answer is the Heavy Marine.

People act like quarians are a bunch of gypsy thieves, which is fucking retarded when you look at the tech they've managed to cobble together over the years. The Heavy Marine is good evidence of this. They take a basic Fleet Marine and give him a full cybernetic conversion (about sixty five percent). They rebuild his suit to the spec of something like Devastator armor, but with powered amplification motors and dedicated shield packages.

This soldier is then equipped with every goddamned toy the quarians could think of – tanglefield wire ejectors, plasma sprayers, slaved drone racks built into the back, micro missile emitters, multiple omni-blades, an eezo-enhanced jetpack, several vision and camera modes, and an overbuilt electro-plasma ejector called the Retribution.

Usually, older, more experienced quarians are picked for this role, so most of these Heavy Marines have fifteen to thirty years combat experience by the time they get redone into this. Heavy Marines deploy in six-person teams and are rarely used in most space combat.

No, they shine best in heavy combat with the geth on planetary bodies or space stations. Geth space stations are without any form of life-support whatsoever, so collateral damage isn't important there, and that was what Heavy Marines were designed to do – take the fight to the geth.

In the Battle of the Citadel, the quarians pod-dropped a bunch of these guys directly into the geth invasion forces in the Wards, and pretty much tore the geth a size twenty five asshole in no time flat. Unlike most quarians, their heavy armor and cybernetics means the Heavy Marines can soak fire damn near as well as turians or batarians can, and they have enough tricks and gadgets that CQB is goddamned suicide.

I haven't gotten a good baseline on their skills, but from what I've seen these would be a solid **2 to 3 Aherns** in a fight. I'm also drawing a blank on how to stop the damned things, aside from planned ambushes with mines or explosives. They have enough direct firepower to shut down heavy infantry, and both anti-tank and anti-mech weapons. Some of them have embedded pulse dissipaters to counter biotics and all of them have personalized infowar and ECM suites.

They can probably survive artillery, which means the only real hope you have is massed anti-material fire from beyond engagement range or air assault – not sure if they have anti-air capacity, but it's likely.

* * *

 **Freaks and Weirdos : Quarian Admirals**

The quarians don't have a civilian leadership, instead being commanded by the Admiralty Board, a group of five senior ranking military officers. Four of the Admirals have specific commands – one is in charge of the Civilian Fleet, one of the Scouting Fleet, one of the Combat Fleet, and one is responsible for science and medical ships and research. The leader of them all, the High Admiral, is in charge of the entire armada.

Becoming an admiral is not as simple as being promoted. Quarians see command officers – captains, fleet captains, and admirals – as paragons of society or some shit. So an admiral has to meet a ton of prerequisites and requirements before they get advanced.

All Admirals are going to be some of the very toughest, strongest soldiers the quarians can field. I've met them all, and two of them are bigger than me. Rael'Zorah, the High Admiral, is the biggest fucking quarian I've ever seen, and Admiral Han'Gerrel wasn't much smaller. From what I gathered in my chat with them, they have to go through a training course similar to an N-series set to make it to captain, another one for fleet captain, and a third for admiral.

Admirals are going to be heavily trained in every type of combat the quarians perform, and every one of them has come from some hard shit. The mousiest of the lot, Daro'Xen, survived being a sex slave for two years and fought her own way free of a batarian slave camp. Rael'Zorah was involved in some kind of mess on the Citadel twenty years ago that had him working with the Shadow Broker and even turians respect him.

Unlike human command officers, an admiral has to project both personal combat power and leadership ability, and I think the former is actually more important than the latter. Strategically, the Admiralty isn't all that hot, as the Battle of the Citadel showed – they let themselves get flanked by geth twice and ended up in a close-range slugging match against heavier ships. Tactically, though, they're pretty sharp.

I would not want to get into any kind of fight with any one of these clowns, Ivan. At the very least, Rael and Han move like trained, hardened killers, and when we did some light practice at the C-Sec firing range, Han'Gerrel could outshoot me in sniping. Given they're the entire government of their people, hostility is probably a bad idea anyway.

Tactically, each admiral seems different. Han'Gerrel is a sniper. Rael'Zorah is a heavy infantryman with a heavy infowar grounding. Daro'Xen is a combat engineer and close quarters specialist (with fucking turian omni-axes, of all things). Zaal'Koris pilots a refitted, salvaged and customized battle-suit that looks like some kind of light asari armor. And Shala'Raan is a former Techmarine, with all the fun that entails.

I'm confident I could take all of them one-on-one, but it certainly wouldn't be pretty, so let's call them **1 Ahern** each.


	6. Drell

**A/N:** _I am not dead, yay! Drell. After this we do some stuff with individuals!_

* * *

 **FROM: FLEET MASTER, SOL, 1ST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV**

 **TO: 5TH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN**

 **ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED**

 **ROUTING: SOLMAINCOMMS → ARCRELCOM → CITFLTCOM**

 _ **CHECKSUM VERIFIED. KEY VERIFIED. DECRYPTING**_

 **SUBJECT: Drell?**

I am glad to hear your wife is having good response to genetic treatment options on the Citadel. I understand that the technology being used is something the asari came up with, but are not sharing with us. I wish at times we had more interest in developing our own technology rather than just using whatever leftovers the asari are giving us.

I should instead probably be glad our relationship with them is less master and servant than that of the drell, no?

I mention drell because we have had yet another of their Dancers attempt entrance to the Mars Archive. I am not understanding why they keep doing this. This time, fifteen Marines and two N-series soldiers were killed, and over fifty injured.

They had to bring the target down with an anti-material rifle. The Hanar Ascendancy has not responded to our official diplomatic contact, and the Council… well, you already know, no doubting.

Given this intolerable and inevitable pack of melkikh vorishek that keep trying to get into the Archives is now a military issue, it might be good of you to share what you know.

As an aside, AIS is having great fun translating your morass of cursing and tactical advice into something useful and less profane.

* * *

 **FROM: 5TH FLEET, COMMANDING, ADMIRAL OF THE RED TRADIUS J. AHERN**

 **TO: FLEET MASTER, SOL, 1ST FLEET SOLGUARD, ADMIRAL OF THE RED IVAN P. DRAGUNOV**

 **ENCODING: BLACKFLASH 774 – SUPERNOVA ONLY ENCRYPTION KEY ATTACHED**

 **ROUTING: CITFLTCOM → ARCRELCOM → SOLMAINCOMMS**

 _ **CHECKSUM VERIFIED. KEY VERIFIED. DECRYPTING**_

 **SUBJECT: At least it isn't fucking hanar**

Have you found _anything_ else out about Hackett? I'm asking because I just did my first review with the fleet logistics Captain. I didn't do one when I got here, seeing as 5th Fleet was smashed to paste and half the fucking logistical team was dead, and I've been busy until recently.

There's a lot of missing shit, Ivan. Three entire fucking cruisers that were slated for decomm are reported to have been disassembled, but there's no records of the materials or security lockouts or anything that you'd see with such a decommissioning… nor was a decomm crew ever signed in. They're just gone – along with two thousand Crossfire rifles, half a ton of omni-gel, about a thousand suits of Onyx and ON-B armor, and a long list of other shit.

The Captain (the first one in the supply chain that doesn't have his finger up his ass) is convinced the stuff was probably destroyed. I'm not so sure.

Dig a bit, would you?

As for drell, fuck. The situation with the drell is, at best, unpleasant. Translation: it's fucked and the Commissar xenoboffins aren't helping a bit. On the one hand, for once I agree with them – pissing off the hanar sounds stupid as shit and likely to not end well. On the other hand, the asari and salarians both have Prothean ruins they haven't allowed access to, but the drell only focus on the Archives, and no one knows why.

With the translation stuff Shepard and T'Soni did before they died, we've figured out more of the Archives, but nothing in them stands out as important enough to have this kind of reaction. That means the hanar know something about the Archives we don't. And that worries me.

I'll tell you what I can confirm; some of this is only from shit I've heard, though.

* * *

 **Drell in General**

So, the basics – drell are lizard guys with perfect memories, better reflexes than a salarian on speed, and scary as fuck biotics. Wiry bastards, about our size and a bit lighter. Not quite as physically strong as our best, but the average drell would beat the dogshit out of the average Marine in a fistfight simply because he's faster and more agile.

They're fast as _fuck_ , hard to pick-up with thermals, and can see in UV and some other crap. I'm not a damned encyclopedia. You can look the rest of the shit up on the Common Knowledge Framework, for all I care. In terms of how they act, most of 'em seem decent enough people. They aren't doing anything fucked up like most of the aliens out here.

Militarily, though, in terms of capacity and potential? They're ugly.

The hanar use them as bodyguards, assassins, goons, and all manner of things. The Drell Concordance is basically a client state of the hanar. They do some work with the Citadel now, donating a few ships, but it's extremely limited. I'm not sure of all the details, but the drell aren't really their own masters, in a lot of ways. But they aren't all entirely at the beck and call of the hanar, either.

Which means, of course, that if drell are trying to break into the Mars Archive, it might be because the hanar told them to… or it might be someone else hired them to do so.

There is no such thing as an 'average' drell soldier. From what I can figure, the drell think armies are stupid as fuck. There's about a bajillion merc units, 'independent contractor groups,' security companies, and special ops types lumped together somehow.

Drell can, however, be categorized.

First off, they wear light armor, if any armor at all. This is good and bad. It's good because when you finally pin the fuckers down, a good blast from anything will put one in either a world of hurt or a puddle of their own blood. Drell aren't much tougher than salarians and on top of that, aren't built to absorb damage.

The bad is that they don't use armor because they don't fucking need the shit. Most non-biotic drell use hanar kinetic shielding that tends to giggle at light to medium weapons fire and will certainly not be dropped by shitty spray and pray from an Avenger. They're agile enough that dodging and movement provide more protection. And the biotic ones have strong barriers.

Second, drell don't fight at medium-range. They either snipe you or close in, quick as a fucking lightning strike. They aren't bad snipers at all, but most of them use the old-fashioned 'one-shot, one-kill' methods, which means if their sniper shot can't penetrate your kinetic barrier, they've left themselves open.

In CQB you can forget fucking landing a hit on the slippery bastards. They're at least as fast as salarians, and are very good at a wide array of martial arts, dirty fighting, and biotic tricks. The drawback is mostly that they tend to get focused on a single target and can be taken out by partner tactics.

Finally, most drell can't operate very well for very long in humid environments, as it plays havoc with their lungs. You'd think they'd have picked up using environmentally sealed armor suits by now, but they tend to avoid that. In any kind of humid conditions, they're a lot slower and cough a lot.

Drell can be batched into four equally ugly groups: mercenary Truthseekers, Ascendancy forces, the Dead, and the Remembrance Dancers.

* * *

 **Drell Truthseekers**

The drell have, like I said, tons of merc companies and shitty fronts for them to sell themselves out to the highest bidder. For the drell, this kind of thing is supposed to be good or upstanding or some shit. Bottom line, drell mercenaries are a bit different than other mercs.

The drell see themselves as tools. They go on and on about not having motives of their own, but only that of those who hire them. There's a lot of these nuts who decided that working for the hanar is limiting them to understanding life or some shit, so they hire out to other races.

They call themselves 'Truthseekers' or 'Truthfinders' or other shit related to truth, and most of them will spend the majority of their lives hired out to one group or another. Truthseekers are different than most drell in that they have a tendency to adapt themselves to their surroundings.

A Truthseeker who hires on with turians will act more turian, use turian weapons, embrace turian tactics, and even stand and die with other turians rather than retreat. One working for the asari, on the other hand, would be more like an asari commando.

These guys are very dangerous because they're experienced veterans. I don't mean in the stupid sense of 'survived a lot of battles' – they've been in all kinds of fucked up situations and seek out unusual (or crazy) jobs to experience more. It is very hard to faze them or put them off-balance, and they've seen enough heavy combat that they have excellent instincts. Unlike most mercenary trash, drell mercs do not break (usually) and will complete the assigned contracts they have no matter the cost in lives.

Most Truthseekers have a heavy kinetic shield and loadouts for both long-range sniping and close-in work, like a shotgun or some kind of melee weapon. Very, very few are biotic. The only good thing is that they don't work for the Ascendancy and thus don't have hanar gear, but they group up into clans and some of the more successful ones can kit their people out in very expensive gear.

Despite being a danger for an average soldier (due to their skill and speed), they're hardly invincible. They don't have any kind of real answer to air assets, artillery, or anything else big and area-effect in nature. Most work in small fire teams of four to six, and one of these fire teams might be worth **half an Ahern**.

* * *

 **Ascendancy Drell**

Most drell work directly for the hanar. Again, there is no formal drell army, so to speak. Hanar float-tides will hire blocs of drell out literally from childhood, train them, equip them, and command them. Entire drell families have worked this way for particular hanar or groups of hanar for _centuries_.

Ascendancy drell are all pretty much identical – non-biotic skirmish units with heavy cross-training in sniping, combat engineering, stealth, and sabotage. The standard kit is a set of some kind of ballistic fiber jumpsuit with super-thin plates of blackish metal that can bounce medium rifle fire, a hanar kinetic shield that makes most of ours look like tissue paper, and a combat kit with more engineering and sabotage toys than the fucking Batman. Weapons are usually hanar make, with most using hanar plasma bolt pistols or SMGs, but some heavy fire teams will carry a prism cannon.

If you've never had the pleasure of watching a fucking three-man team blow up a Shieldbreaker, watch the video I attached. Prism cannon is some kind of super-pumped X-ray laser bullshit that ignores armor and is the nastiest heavy support weapon I've ever seen.

Drell snipers will use mostly salarian rifles (since hanar don't use sniper rifles and don't make them either) and use more conventional chip tactics than Truthseeker snipers.

Ascendancy military doctrine, if there is such a thing, is that these drell work to 'frame' the heavies (hanar or Dancers) when they go in hard, in boarding actions and whatnot. In a way, they're a lot more dangerous than Truthseekers, simply because of their much better equipment and training. On the other hand, they are not nearly as well seasoned or experienced in combat, and especially in unfamiliar situations, have a noted tendency to dig in.

Assaulting these assholes is best left to mechs and disposable units, like Penal Legionaries, to soften them up and soak off some of the firepower, then drop heavy attacks on them. If they're dug in around a prism cannon team, you can fucking forget assaulting that position directly, artillery is the best bet. (Prism cannon can act as anti-air as well as anti-armor. Ugh.)

A normal Ascendancy fire team is not even worth **half an Ahern** , but the ones with Prism Cannons are worth a ** full Ahern** **.** That weapon is dangerous and nothing in our current arsenal will even slow it down.

* * *

 **The Dead**

When most people think of drell special forces, they think of the Remembrance Dancers. Which makes sense, seeing how fucking scary those bastards are. But Dancers are priest-assassins, not soldiers. While they're lethal and killy and shit, they don't serve the drell or the hanar directly in most cases, and unlike most drell, the Dancers choose their contracts.

No, the real special forces of the drell are rarely seen. The records we have of them are courtesy of the asari, who last encountered them in the Second Refusal War. They're called the 'Dead.'

From what I gathered (and a quick vidcall to Tela), the Dead are the closest thing the drell have to heavy infantry. They're all raised from birth by the hanar on a desert hellworld on the fringes of Hanar Space. From the minute they're born, they are all legally dead. They have no rights, no freedom, and are brainwashed and conditioned to utmost obedience.

Why this happens couldn't matter less to me. Fucking aliens. The meat of the issue is what kind of killer it produces.

On a purely technical and tactical level, the Dead aren't that scary. They are never biotic, and they wear heavier armor than most drell, which cuts down on the acrobatics a bit. What makes them dangerous is the heavy level of hanar cybernetics they get implanted with. Most of these guys are trained for twenty years in a hellscape that would challenge krogan, being eventually taken to about fifty to sixty percent cybernetic conversion along the way.

The Dead are the hanar's throwaway soldiers. From what Tela told me, most of the really crazy shit done in the Second Refusal War was done by these guys. Hanar ships have some kind of short-range teleporter and they'd board ships with these crazy fuckers, who would usually shoot up the ship while sabotaging it to blow up.

The Dead are trained as heavy infantry, using mostly mass-market heavy machine guns and combat shotguns, drones, and explosives. From the video I've seen, they work in close tandem with hanar military guides until deployed, then basically go buck-wild on a target. This probably doesn't sound so bad until you realize they are expected to die in any fight they go into, and have had the fear of death literally removed from them.

Fighting an enemy who doesn't care about dying is not as simple as it sounds. The turians found that out when they struck on the Citadel. The Council Guard probably killed almost five hundred of them before they were just overrun.

Between armor, barriers, and their cybernetic conversion, the Dead are _extremely_ difficult to take down. Again, old video shows one soaking multiple direct hits from a fucking lance cannon before dropping, and he still was firing his weapon even as he died. You can forget light and medium weapons and most grenades; you'll need armor-piercing heavy weapons or really powerful high-explosives (or plasma) to put these fuckers down.

The armor they wear is EMP hardened, so most conventional anti-cyborg tactics won't work real hot. They also fling around a lot of anti-biotic gear, so biotic assault is going to be a waste of good biotics. The fact that the hanar usually teleport them close to a target means you won't have time to set up artillery, and they carry heavy enough weapons that they can be a credible threat even to armor, mech, or aerospace assets.

The good news is the hanar only push these boys out during a real conflict, not for little shit. When they aren't in use, they get popped into stasis and put on a shelf for the next big mess. That's good, in that we don't have to deal with the fuckers, and it's bad because that also means they have a stockpile of these things waiting for the next big blow up.

Having never fought them personally, and going from what I've gleaned from talking to some old asari and the videos, a single Dead is probably worth a ****single Ahern**** **.** They work in ten-person teams, though, so that may be problematic.

* * *

 **Freaks and Weirdos : Remembrance Dancers**

Everyone knows a bunch of scary shit about Remembrance Dancers. Most of it's just legends.

Dancers are drell… priest monks. They worship the old drell gods and are intercessors or some shit for the drell people. The drell believe the death of a sapient being is only a bad thing if they die unremembered, that the death is not the important thing, so much as why they died.

The Dancers, then, memorize each of their targets and victims, praying for their souls or something with their gods before, you know, they brutally murder them.

Dancers are all biotic acrobatic _freaks_ , decked out in red leather coats and who use laser-steel knives they can fling with distressing accuracy. The robes cover up thin-line combat armor, with pauldrons made of some hanar metal that can block an active warp sword. Most of them specialize in unarmed and melee biotic-assisted combat, but also take up sniping and are pretty good at it.

Dancers have a really ugly array of biotic powers, some of them so fucking strange even asari can't figure out how they do it. They are fast, nearly as fast as a salarian transcendental, and they have very good cloaking equipment, usually staggered paired seven to ten-second cloaks.

Their combat tactics are straight out of a fucking ninja show. They use stealth and concealment to get close to a target, then go in with overwhelming strike power from surprise. Landing a hit on the stupid assholes is nearly impossible, they're agile and dodge well and the armor they wear can take some staggeringly hard hits without failing.

Dancer biotics aim for maximum confusion, with lots of use of disabling attacks and weird shit to cripple bodyguards or powerful targets. The legends of Dancers cutting through dozens of attackers in seconds are not made up stories, but very real.

Dancers are lethal when they strike from stealth and surprise, and most of their mystique comes from that and the fact that they're very good at setting up situations to make themselves a harder target. Drell in CQB will liberally use infowar tricks and traps to baffle or infuriate secondary targets, and they're not above deploying poison gas or black-nano into a combat zone to thin out defenders.

That doesn't mean they're invincible. Outnumbered and unable to hide, they're nasty, but not much better than a good asari commando. They can take some heavy hits, but not in sequence. They do very poorly in open battle and, while they can slaughter hundreds of idiots if they have cover, concealment, and opportunity for movement, if they're pinned in place they'll die as easy as fucking batarians.

That being said…

You've seen what the fuckers can do up close. A group of Dancers was able to kill one of the Priestesses of the Sun about a thousand years ago, although they all died doing it. Having seen Thana Vathan fling a goddamned main battle tank out of her way like slapping back a gnat, this is something that should worry everyone.

Dealing with Dancers is best done by tightening security, Ivan. Nothing we have is really geared towards defense from stealth attacks, and Dancers specialize in infiltration to a point to launch such attacks. The best ways to kill them when they have the drop on you is mass firepower, combined with as many grenades and area-effect attacks as you can manage. If they can't close in quickly and can be pinned in place, they can be dealt with.

One-on-one? Not survivable. I don't give a fuck who you are, the only people who ever survived going mano-a-mano with these freaks are all freaks themselves – Tetrimus, Tyriun no Kage, Okeer, Shift, that kind of thing. Like I said, when the shit went down in my Spectre trial, failed Dancers – that is, guys who couldn't make the cut – were part of the assassination team.

Three of them cut down a war priestess and then butchered two entire asari commando teams, mostly by dint of hide-and-seek in the stupidly narrow confines of the Armali gardens. Okeer killed them, but he got put in the hospital doing it.

Tactics… I'm kind of drawing a blank, here. It's not that Dancers are invincible, like I said. But when you factor into account that you are only going to get them in an open fight after they've sprung their surprise, there is simply no way to stop them or kill them off without taking heavy losses and possibly the assassination of someone important.

The one weakness they have is they tend to neglect medium-range combat, so if you can somehow pick them up incoming, they can be held off by massed fire and biotics.

As far as a rating goes, at least ** 5 Aherns**, if not more, per Dancer.


End file.
